Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I am glad we are making progress on this issue. At least the entanglement of the Oireachtas in foreign affairs is now accepted.

I do not agree with Senator Brian Hayes on this issue although there is much merit to his argument. The solution is to create a UN structure whereby we can assume that we will only rarely have to draw on superpower status. Chances are that, within ten years, there may well be a couple of other permanent members with vetoes, and there may be all sorts of other changes. This issue could be revisited if there were a succession of circumstances regarding which the Irish people felt we should be involved and that the aforementioned mechanism was the only reason preventing us from becoming involved.

I have no objection in principle to a legitimate, valid method of despatching Irish troops into potentially dangerous situations but I am very sceptical about the something-must-be-done school of thought which espoused, during the horrors of the Yugoslavian civil war, that we should have sent an army to the region. The leader of a particular NGO which deals with development issues responds to every difficult set of circumstances in the developing world by suggesting we should send in an army. If we had sent in as many armies as that individual saw fit, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of the world's defence forces would probably be tied up in all sorts of difficult circumstances. We therefore need to avoid the something-should-be-done school of military intervention. The triple lock mechanism puts the something-should-be-done mentality through a good, efficient filter such that only conflicts in respect of which military intervention is regarded as both valid and potentially successful can be considered.

The idea of sending an intervention force into horrors such as those that obtained in Bosnia and Croatia at the height of their civil war is hair-raising when one considers the amount of death and slaughter that might result to no great purpose. I have never been persuaded that large-scale military intervention ever stabilises any conflict and it always postpones rather than creates a resolution. In this regard, consider the conflict in Afghanistan.

What looked like a decisive end to a particular system of government may not have been nearly as decisive or as final as people thought at the time. I am still waiting to see what will happen in Kosovo where again there appeared to be a military intervention to stop the Serbian attack. I am not sure what the outcome will be there because I am sceptical about the use of overwhelming military force of the kind that, incidentally, may be used in Gaza in the next few days, to achieve anything other than a good feeling among the supporters on one side. The whole triple lock mechanism is cumbersome, slow and, I agree, occasionally embarrassing but I would be prepared to revisit it if we had a succession of these kinds of situations. The only problem we have had so far is with Macedonia. If it becomes a regular feature and if the United Nations became permanently divided, it would be valid but at this stage it is neither necessary nor essential.